Racist all white Vanity Fair Cover?

Great Debates
81

My non-white daughter asked me at the grocery store why they were all white.

The button noses and patrician looks remark seems to sum it all up. I see no point to the magazine pointing out how white their appearances are in celebrating them other than to invite us all to bask in their whiteness.

Maybe they had a hard time finding non-white actresses. This just shows that the problem is more pervasive than with Vanity Fair. They should have tried harder to find a non-white actress: America Ferrera,Kristen Kreuk, Maggie Q, Vanessa Hudgens, Brenda Song (the last two associated with kids’ shows but imo with very promising futures ahead of them). Why should Hollywood try harder to promote equality when magazines such as Vanity Fair idolize the opposite?

82

Well, perhaps I should have said non-Hispanic white to make my point clearer.

But to your point, many Latinos do self-identify as white…until they immigrate over here and find out that they aren’t viewed that way by most of the population.

83

No, you’re missing the point. Many Hispanics/Latinos are indistinguishable from what most Americans call “White”. They may or may not retain their cultural background, just like a 3rd, 4th, 5th generation white European might not care that much about their background, or may have become so mixed that they’re now German/English/Italian/Cuban or Mexican/Norwegian/French, etc.

Example 1: my grandfather changed our last name from something long with a lot of vowels - it was Basque origin name - to something English sounding. He always had fair skin, but his grandfather was a Mexican bricklayer. In Europe I am often mistaken for German (and recently Finnish), but never for Mexican and seldom for American.

Example 2: at my son’s ballpark, you could take a snapshot of a given team and I guarantee you you’d only be able to identify 1/4 to 1/3 of the kids who are Hispanic/Latino as such. Many have blue eyes, fair skin, or otherwise look like every other kid around. Ditto some of their parents. Most are Panamanian, Dominican, Cuban, Venezuelan, Ecuadorean, etc. Some of the Cubans look white or black, none look particularly “Cuban” (there is not, IMO, a Cuban look). One kid is either 1/2 or 1/4 Japanese with beautiful green eyes, and only looks vaguely Asian. Funny enough, his mother told me he used to be upset that he wasn’t Latino like his friends. The Latino part is mostly about food and culture, but that will blend with generational changes. They self identify as white because that’s the color of their skin.

My point is that whites won’t become the minority because a lot of people who come in to the country will become white, even if they are from Latin countries. If you’d looked at the demographics around the turn of the century you might have said the country was becoming less white because of the Italians. Now we just see Italians as another version of white Americans. The Latinos that people see as “taking over” are a mix, not a homogeneous group. The easily visible ones cutting our lawns are usually the ones that are mostly indigenous background and make up the poorest population in Mexico. They are escaping economic hardship in Mexico and other Central American countries where they make up the lower classes and have had fewer opportunities. Once they get here, they or their children will start to intermarry with other Americans and eventually become more white and identify less with their parents and grandparents background. If they get out of the old Barrios they might eventually lose their Spanish. Not all of them, of course.

Here are some pictures of Mexicans and other Latinos to illustrate my point:

Mexican girls
Guillermo Del Toro
Two Cuban girls
Cuban soap actor Jordi Vilasuso
Half Cuban Cameron Diaz
Cuban girl
America Ferrera(born in USA, parents are from Honduras)

84

The same can be said for some Black people. Derek Jeter comes to mind.

I never knew he was black until reading an article that mentioned it. Jeter even gets the “white athlete” treatment, being called “scrappy”, “gritty”, and “intelligent”, instead of “effortlessly gifted.”

85

Bi-racial/multi-racial/multi-ethnic kids throw off the curve.

Alicia Keys is another (beautiful) example. She’s also got some nice curves, so I’ve always wondered why she doesn’t get more love on these Boards.

86

Physically, some are indistinguishable from Anglos. And? It doesn’t counter the point I was making, so I don’t understand why you think your point is worth stressing.

This is not a secret to anyone, seriously. But can you really not see that repeatedly showing only or mostly Anglos to the exclusion of other ethnic/racial groups is an issue regardless of what people self-identify as, or what the future makeup of America will look like when everyone assimilates? Most Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans that I know do not lump themselves in with WASPs; so they may call themselves “white” but they doesn’t mean that a cover full of Reese Weatherspoon wannabees speaks to them the same way that a cover that features some of their own does. And why would it?

87

Woah! Is that the kid from Cosby? She *did *grow up stunning.

88

Just re: those linked covers. One is from a series of covers specifically devoted to Africa (several of which include Caucasians – I don’t have a problem with that, given the context and the specific people they chose, but it is funny that even with that series they included token whites).

The other two only include non-white girls after the fold. And the teen stars one – yeah, that’s Lindsay Lohan Raven Symoné’s standing next to. Just to give you an idea of how old that one is.

89

Of course, if you searched on a different day than I did results would vary because, as I understand it, how frequently a site gets a “hit” can affect where in the search results it shows up. If people have been deliberately looking for non-whites on Vanity Fair covers this past week that could change the results.

In other words, I don’t dispute your search yielded different results than mine.

90

Here in America white culture is the dominant culture, but when it comes to their ‘heritage’ most white people I know indentify and feel a claim to with the European cultures their relatives came from, most often in the last century.

I’m of Scotch and British descent, but I am a ‘Daughter of the American Revolution’ - two of my ancestors signed the American constitution. I feel pretty plainly American and white, myself.

Irish American Heritage Month is March. Italian American Heritage Month is October. Jewish American Heritage Month is May (designatedin 2006 by George W. Bush). Most people who would celebrate these months are light-skinned and identify as white.

Exactly! I don’t think this particular instance is a deliberate racial/racist statement. It’s just another symptom of the widespread institutional racism in America and the dominance of white culture. It’s certainly noteworthy for this reason.

At this point in time, I think it’s fairly inexcusable. Even if I couldn’t think of one non-white actress who fit the criteria (under 30, recently getting more roles and a bigger name for herself in the last 2 years, thin) - and I surely can - I do think an effort should be made to balance media representation of women in particular ethnically and racially (I would like to see more balance in size and body types also). ‘Token’ or not.

91

Another thing they could have done is a sidebar with “also-rans” that might acknowledge other actresses and why they weren’t included. For example “Zoe Saldana - she appeared in a prior group of up and coming actresses and we don’t feature actresses twice on the list, we had an age cut-off of 30 and she is 31, and with major roles in two of the year’s biggest films we don’t think she’s up and coming, we think she has arrived.” As a hypothetical example. That doesn’t mean it’s the ideal solution, or in any way obligatory, but magazines often have such sidebars with folks who didn’t make the cut for this or that list.

92

Jack? Roll Bounce? For real? These are the movies you’re using to show someone is “up and coming”? I’ve heard Eve’s Bayou is quite good, but it was a very small movie. There are dozens of “white people movies” that are criticially acclaimed that few people have actually seen.

In order: television actress, television actress, terrible actress, see ShibbOleth’s “some Latinos are white” post, television actress.

93

Freida Pinto - seriously. Highly recognizable after Slumdog, 3 movies coming out this year and is now filming a movie with Woody Allen and closing a deal as a face of L’oreal. She’s even thin with patrician features.

Or Catalina Sandino Moreno - third Hispanic actress nominated for an Academy Award for Maria, Full of Grace. Also in Fast Food Nation, the Che biopic, and in a bunch of upcoming movies including a Twilight movie (I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve known who she was since I saw the first trailer for Maria).

94

Never seen Jack but if movies like Mean Girls, Zombieland, and The House Bunny count, so does Roll Bounce. Blake Lively is/was also a television actress. She was on a previous cover. They really don’t have many excuses.

Every so often Hollywood latches on to an actress and promotes her as the new ‘it girl’. Some of them are it: Scarlett Johannson, Reese Witherspoon. Some of them aren’t: Gretchen Mol, Julia Ormond. I don’t recall ever seeing this happen for a black actress.

95

Whoosh.

96

Boyo Jim (and someone else, whom I can’t recall at the moment) spoke truthfully: There can indeed be racism without malice.

Broomstick said:

I think it technically possible, lexically speaking, for such a thing as non-malevolent racism to exist. Haven’t bothered to look up “racism” in any dictionary, but I’d wager that none specify any sort of emotion or intention to the definition. So Broomstick may–again, technically–be correct in his/her way of thinking about the word.

However…

I think that in the reality of American dialogue, there is indeed a sort of de facto distinction in most people’s minds between “bias” and “racism”. As I see it, the former just represents a tendency, often unconscious and thus almost certainly not malevolent, towards viewing one group as “superior”, “better”, more “beautiful”, etc., than others. The latter to me suggests an active, malicious bigotry, a result of conscious cogitation on the subject.

Someone once said something along the lines of, “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.” I think that’s largely applicable here, WRT to the VF cover.

One last comment: Honestly, I tend to side with Contrapuntal in his/her assessment of the significance of this issue, and its implications for the state of race relations in the US. Only fifty years ago, in the American South, blacks were being lynched, systematically denied their voting rights, and suffered forced segregation in the public sphere. Now the US has a black President (a fact that fills me with joy and pride, whether or not I agree with all of his politics), and the apparent exclusion of women of colour from a magazine cover seems to be the most pressing issue* of “discrimination” at the moment? Wow. We’ve come a long way, indeed.

*Nota bene that I am not bemoaning the discussion here, per se. Eternal vigilance against racism is our moral and civic duty; being aware of it and speaking out against it is always necessary. I’m just saying that the VF cover is not racism, nor is it even a particularly grave instance of bias.

97

I don’t think it’s an either/or thing. Magazine covers and so on were issues back then, too–but obviously not quite as pressing as the other issues. It’s all a symptom of the same problem. It contributes to the idea that white is mainstream and that if you’re nonwhite, you’re other–you don’t really belong. It’s little things that add up–flesh colored crayons formerly being peach colored, no dark foundation make up at one point, white dolls being the most easy to find. Again, I’ll mention Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye–it’s the idea that being attractive and visible means being white and being black means operating outside of that.

It’s not as simple as “Too many white folk on a magazine cover.” It’s more a symptom of a problem that defines normal as white and everyone else as exotic or other.

98

Ask 100 American tween girls of any ethnicity what they want to be when they grow up. I guarantee more aspire to be actresses (or actresses/models/singers with their own fashion lines) than president. It may be pathetic, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I’m not tearing my hair out and weeping over this cover, and I don’t think anyone would argue that there aren’t more pressing issues facing ethnic minorities in present-day America, but to ignore the real (and possibly negative) impact media images have on young girls – especially when so many of them aspire to join the celebrity culture being depicted – is naive.

99

True, but it’s also important to note that this is Vanity Fair. Teen girls don’t read Vanity Fair. They read Entertainment Weekly, Teen Vogue, Cosmo Girl, J-14 and blogs. All of which often which non-white actresses.

Ask a teen girl about Selena Gomez sometime. Like OMG! They’ll talk your ear off for an hour!

100

It’s a little hard for me to describe where I am coming from, since it’s apparent that many people have never, ever been the minority in your country, your town, your surroundings, your school, your workplace, for your entire life. But I will try.

Am I saying this magazine cover was racist? Absolutely not.

Am I saying this magazine cover could have stood to have an Asian girl and/or a black girl? Absolutely.

Growing up non-white in this country - every thing I was exposed to had white people on it. Beautiful blondes everywhere. When I was growing up there wasn’t one Asian doll. I don’t remember if there was black dolls back then. I do know all of my Barbies were white.

Every image of beauty was white people. Seriously watch the movies in the 80s. You get lots and lots of white men and women and occasionally a black male. Hardly ever even a black female.

There is a Bloom County strip that I identify with very strongly. In it, the little black girl Ronald-Ann is sitting and watching TV. She says,

“Sometimes, I wish I had long, flowing, golden locks like Christie Brinkley-”
and slaps herself and then looks sheepishly at the reader and says “Sorry”.

That’s what non-whites are made to feel in this country. Just…not there. Not ugly, necessarily, but non-existant. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”, you know.

But what I know is that the LEGAL E. Indian immigrants have increased 53% from 2003 to 2009. That’s just Indians! Chinese people have been around for more than 200 years! We do exist! In droves.

We’re as much a part of this country as white people are. So it might have been nice to throw a token bone at us and say, here is a beautiful young woman of X ancestry who is an up and coming actress.

We don’t even mind living vicariously through blacks, as I mentioned before. Sure, put up a black woman. We’ll be happy. At least there’s some acknowledgement that not just white people live here, others do too.

Am I mad about it? Hell no. Am I reconciled? Completely. Am I happy about it? Nope. It’s life and sure as hell there are bigger fish to fry but I never came out with a giant Pit thread about it. Simply responded in the way I felt.